AT&T in Madison, Wisconsin decided to publish a Yellow Pages only directory and offered a White Pages supplement if a homeowner was interested.
Only about 2% of the over 600,000 homeowners asked for the White Pages supplement. Here’s the full article.
The scary part is that there are still a lot of markets out there delivering White Page directories where 98% of the people couldn’t care less.
How about the Yellow Pages?
If your retailers are spending money on the Yellow Pages I wouldn’t tell them to completely walk away from that expense but I would recommend they take a good percentage of that money and transfer it to Google Local Search. We know that 80% of consumers walking into a store to make a considered purchase go online before they go into the store. I’ll bet that 80% don’t go to the Yellow Pages before going to a store.
Local advertising is changing, make sure your retailers are keeping up with the times.